Description:
Artifacts made by flaking stone are the oldest tools that archaeologists recover, dating back to more than 3 million years. Flaked stone tools continued to be essential in North America until after European contact. Even for relatively recent times, lithic artifacts provide a principal means for making inferences about numerous aspects of past human behavior.
Potential Tasks:
This project is designed to provide students with hands-on experience in the descriptive analysis of a specific stone tool assemblage. The assemblage comes from a habitation site in Utah occupied around 1000 years ago by people of the Fremont culture, people that both farmed maize and other crops and foraged for wild resources. Students will work closely with the faculty advisor to learn about how to conduct a lithic analysis. The focus will be on attributes informative of raw material selection and enhancement through heat treatment, production technology, and tool use. The overall goal, aside from helping to train budding archaeologists, is to help understand stone tool production, function, and stylistic aspects potential indicative of learning networks and social interaction.
Student Qualifications:
Background or coursework in Anthropology.
| Faculty Advisor | Dr. Phil R Geib |
| Contact E-mail | pgeib2@unl.edu |
| Department | Anthropology, SGIS |
| Potential UCARE Research Position? | Yes |
| UCARE Terms | next academic year (2023-2024) |
| Start Date | 08/21/2023 |
| Flexible Start Date? | Yes |
| Paid or Volunteer Work? | Paid by UCARE Funding |
| Hours per Week | 10 |
